Rateless Spinal Codes

A fundamental problem in wireless networks is to develop communication protocols that achieve high throughput in the face of noise, interference, and fading, all of which vary with
time. An ideal solution is a rateless wireless system, in which
the sender encodes data without any explicit estimation or
adaptation, implicitly adapting to the level of noise or interference. In this paper, we present a novel rateless code, the
spinal code, which uses a hash function over the message bits
to produce pseudo-random bits that in turn can be mapped directly to a dense constellation for transmission. Results from
theoretical analysis and simulations show that spinal codes
essentially achieve Shannon capacity, and out-perform best known ﬁxed rate block codes.